


free-float

by stubborn_jerk



Category: The Penumbra Podcast, Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Character Study, Far Future, Immortality, Implied Relationships, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Introspection, Other, Outer Space, Planets, Post-Canon, pre-canon TPP
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-31
Updated: 2020-03-31
Packaged: 2021-02-28 16:29:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23410219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stubborn_jerk/pseuds/stubborn_jerk
Summary: When Isabel followed the others into the Sol and back to Earth, the last thing on her mind was the semantics of how she was going to live.
Relationships: Hera & Isabel Lovelace, Hera & Miranda Pryce, Isabel Lovelace/Renée Minkowski
Comments: 6
Kudos: 30





	free-float

When Isabel followed the others into the Sol and back to Earth, the last thing on her mind was the semantics of how she was going to live.

Given, she was out of the loop— thank God for _that_ , she hated that loop. If she had to listen to Eiffel make the same joke a million more times, she couldn’t have rebooted herself faster— which meant that she was free-floating.

_Free-floating._

Music didn’t play through her comms this time; Lambert didn’t tell himself he was going to do it _some_ day either. There was nothing tethering her to the Hephaestus.

The Hephaestus. 

_It’s gone._

They were going back to Earth.

The ghosts followed her, but at least she was out of the loop.

They were going back to Earth. She was coming to Earth, she reminded herself. She’d never once stepped on the planet, had snippets of memories that weren’t hers.

She thought about what would happen if she breached the atmosphere, what would happen if she died away from the star, what would happen if she revived and woke up in a morgue, in a grave, like one of those old horror movies she—Isabel from another lifetime used to watch with her college buddies.

She thought and thought and thought and then they landed.

* * *

Earth _pushed_.

Once upon a time, in a

 _different_ consciousness,

 _different_ body,

 _different_ existence,

Isabel dozed off in class when they told her about gravity. 

Something about an apple, the formulas that explained it, how it made a whole paradigm shift. How it could affect you, coming into the atmosphere. How you could forget to place things on surfaces and drop them on the floor. How your spine, after an untold number of years in deep space, would expand and make you taller.

There was no foresight that saved her from forgetting how to live in space. It wasn’t needed, because they all adjusted too fast, too well in Earth’s atmosphere for her liking. She was the queen of the paranoia game, but this rubbed her wrong in so many ways, it wasn’t even fun anymore.

She didn’t tell anyone.

Goddard was gone.

Being untethered was becoming more and more infuriating as the days passed. 

_An_ Isabel Lovelace had the same feeling when she had her operation and quit basketball. 

_This_ Isabel Lovelace didn’t have the air force to fall back on. Couldn’t help but scoff at the idea of space or air travel after deep space.

Part of her didn’t know if it was because she wanted gravity to tether her to compensate for her life still orbiting Wolf 359 or if it was because she technically didn’t exist on Earth’s records anymore.

Jacobi fixed that.

He let them into a compound that was missing a Sensus unit. Upon further prodding, he revealed that it was an SI-5 property that Kepler gained ownership of before launching them into deep space. It had been the first place he brought Hera upon landing.

It was the nicest thing he’d done for her since they left the Sol apart from not trying to infuriate her on their trip back to Earth, and Isabel suspected it had more to do with Eiffel than it did with Hera.

They all lived together.

The compound was big enough that they didn’t have to see each other unless they needed to, but that didn’t stop anything from them wanting to, and that made Isabel’s skin itch.

_Different walls._

_Same faces._

_No_ ,

this was different. They weren’t floating into rooms anymore; they weren’t woken up by the PA’s klaxon alarms every other hour.

Isabel still didn’t sleep much. 

None of them did.

The semantics of how she was living became unavoidable in that SI-5 compound with everyone else. 

Time flew by. Her life continued to orbit Wolf 359, broken only when one of the others asked her to come out with them on trips to malls or resorts or other things she forgot about the moment she woke up from nightmares—

 _flashes_ —

_no, they **were** nightmares now, there was night on Earth._

Pryce and Doug regained their memories after year three, which was when Isabel stopped counting.

Minkowski met up with her ex-husband. 

Hera gained a body. 

Daniel and Doug got married, each with different names.

Isabel stayed the same. Kept her distance. 

Renée kissed her.

Pryce built herself a new skin-suit and passed herself off as Hera’s human twin.

_Avoid the ghosts._

_Don’t think about them._

_Keep moving._

_Keep going._

With Pryce’s research in Goddard bleeding out to the public through NASA and the education system, humanity finally breached the atmosphere and left to study the surrounding solar system for habitation. Then, the other solar systems.

One-percenters followed soon after. 

A few decades after, they reveal Martian archeological findings. 

A few decades after, they founded Hyperion City.

More one-percenters came back with news from star systems farther than their friendly neighborhood red dwarf.

Seems like they’ve struck a deal with Bob.

Doug should have seen it.

That’s what Hera said.

“He should have seen it.” She’s crying next to Isabel on the couch, watching the news play on the TV. She figured out how to do that after the fifth model Pryce gave her. This was her fiftieth. They still looked the same.

_Same walls._

_Same planet._

_Fewer of them but they were still the same faces._

Isabel let her lean on her shoulder, not minding the artificial snot or tears. “He would have said something about how they grow up so fast, how just yesterday he taught them th-the alphabet.”

Isabel didn’t shush her, nor did she point out the way Hera's glitching came back. That was a _different_ Isabel.

They all lived longer than they could have hoped for, aged longer than everyone else. Isabel accounted it all on her blood, how once upon a time, Eiffel came up to them one-by-one and stabbed them with a syringe full of Isabel’s blood. 

That wasn’t to say that Pryce didn’t offer them skin-suit immortality like she had and Cutter had. Doug was just adamant about how distasteful that was, and Daniel had no choice but to agree, the recovering vaguely horrible person that he was.

Renée was proud.

...

Renée died in deep space. She came back to her love of space after the first decade of advancements and didn’t come back.

Isabel tried very hard not to think about it.

It took twenty long, lonely centuries on Earth, recovering from Wolf 359 before Isabel steps foot on a space shuttle again.

It’s _different_ now.

_Same planet—_

_Shut. Up._

The shuttle she’d stepped into on her first run-around on the Hephaestus required a whole lot of prep, a lot of training and suits and warnings about air pressure and equipment.

This one looked like a subway.

Hera stayed. Was adamant to stay, actually, and that was all well and good for Isabel, considering she was running the planet’s first and only galactic telecommunications system with a hundred other Sensus units she and Pryce designed. 

( _Birthed_ seemed like the wrong word, no matter Hera’s namesake. 

Greek myths were Isabel’s least favorite anyway).

Isabel didn’t want to travel deep space, so to speak, just run around Solar system until she stopped thinking.

* * *

There’s a crater on Venus with her name on it. 

It’s where one of the biggest tourist spots in the Solar system was located. Crater Isabella contained a casino, an amusement park, fifteen high-rise hotels, and a few control buildings in case the Dome collapsed during Venus’ off-season.

Venus was one of the first exploited resources the one-percenters tapped into. Earth had run out of a lot of resources before they moved on to other planets, and this one had an abundance of metal when you waited every other month and it was a stone’s throw away.

Isabel had her fair share of tourist moments. 

She sent a few images back to Hera and Pryce now and again of her getting a massage, a view over the pool that showed the Sol’s solar flare tinted by the Dome that protected the crater, and hell maybe a few tasty pictures here and there that Hera returned in edgewise. 

(Don’t ask about it.)

She got bored of the perpetual vacation and jumped into the next shuttle taking her anywhere.

* * *

Luna, Earth’s one and only moon, was more military base than Hawaii was, the last time she visited, but it housed one of the first intergalactic cities Earth founded after Bob and their compatriots showed them the currents to travel through.

Selene City was a largely Islamic-inspired city with Indian and Chinese influences, and Isabel _loved_ it(strong word, she knows, but it was simpler than ‘it made her feel small in the grand scheme of Time), the way Earth’s oldest civilizations and religions mixed and matched and added on top of each other using foreign metals from Jupiter, Venus, and Mars, colors from minerals imported from exoplanets as far as Kepler-1229b. 

(God, she’d call the planet something else if she had any say in it, but she was immortal, not a time traveler.)

She spent her time on Luna going to museums, libraries, mosques, and temples. She decided to ditch tourist destinations, then, stick to planets with histories she didn’t know about, look around towns and cultures she’s never seen before, travel its entirety, and learn all she could.

She went a few nights flitting to and fro Luna, warming a few beds here and there, if she could help it. She stopped in the middle of plazas to people-watch.

Once bored, she stepped into a shuttle and left.

* * *

It doesn’t change elsewhere. She goes the farthest from Sol she could get while still inside the system. Spends weeks on Pluto, a few moons here and there, Io, Ganymede. Causes some trouble in the Outer Rim, breaks a few hearts in Io, meets up with Pryce in Uranus and milks the joke for all three days they stay in.

She stays on Jupiter for months, earning and spending creds, does a few charity runs, in the loosest sense of the phrase, and Robin Hoods her way around a few joints on Saturn’s rings.

Every time, she grows bored.

_Different planet._

_Different faces._

_Different cultures._

_No walls, in some of them._

_Then why the hell hasn’t anything **changed**?_

* * *

Landing on Mars and seeing Earth out of the shuttle’s window made her jolt, seeing it greener than it was when she left. It felt like when she hadn’t been outside for so long and her shoes felt weird, tight but not any smaller.

What day was it? Hell, what _year_ was it?

Sitting down in Hyperion’s spaceport, she flicks through her comms and calls Hera.

“ _Captain Lovelace! Hey, where’ve you been?_ ”

“Still just Isabel, Hera. And, uh, everywhere?”

“ _I don’t track where you are anymore, remember? This isn’t the compound anymore, you got to be more specific than ‘everywhere’_.”

She chuckled, “I like how you’re pretending not to have been tracking me at all. What stories have you heard about me, hm?”

“ _I think you were in a few robberies on Saturn’s rings, but you didn’t hear that from me. The last official thing I’ve heard was when Miranda came back from Uranus._ ”

Isabel smirked. “She didn’t spend _that_ long in it.”

After a moment, Hera deadpanned, “ _I’ve forgotten how childish you were and I wish to keep it that way, Captain._ ”

With a chuckle, she checked her watch, a dingy new one with a lot of numbers that didn't make sense to her if she stared at it for too long. “Say, how long has it been since I’ve been away from Earth? Do you know?”

“ _Well, you **definitely** left before the name change. It’s Terra now, apparently_.” She didn't sound too thrilled about it.

“Who cares?”

“ _Right?! Also, I think it’s been a couple... decades? Centuries? Can’t be sure. When did you say you left?_ ”

“I wouldn’t have asked if I remembered, Hera _,”_ Isabel shot back. With a sigh, she followed, “Well, I’m in Hyperion. Mars. Is that close enough for you to visit? Because I think I might go around for a few months here before coming home.”

Hera hummed in consideration. “ _I’ll ring you when I’ve thought about it. I wanted to go off-Solar but I guess... I can settle for Hyperion?_ ” She wasn't very enthused about it, so that meant Isabel wasn't going to get her hopes up about a yes.

“Okay, talk to you soon.”

“ _Be safe._ ”

Hyperion City had a lot of Indian and African influences, but it was primarily built by Americans, and it shocked Isabel, coming from planets with influences so detached from Earth. Hyperion was the most Earth-like city she’d seen in a while.

(And not a single white person in the crowds, as far as the eye could see.

…

She had to think about that at some point. Had white people suddenly gone extinct in the past few centuries? Why hadn't she noticed?)

It was like New York, when she got down to it. An Isabel a lifetime ago left DC a for a gap year and wandered around New York’s streets for a few days.

Barring a completely _different_ species of pests infesting the streets, Hyperion was the _same_ schtick. 

_Same_ crowded streets,

 _same_ trash littered around,

 _same_ street names, 

_same_ humid December chill even though her comms told her it was March on Earth.

 _Variations on a theme_.

Isabel shook her head.

“You lost or something?”

She turned to see someone dressed in a blood-red wedding sari drinking straight out a bottle of something cheap, glaring blue eyes at her. She’d seen that glare before.

“In thought? Yes. Literally? Also, yes,” she replied. She shoved her hands into her pockets for warmth, feeling the cold this person was decidedly not feeling for themselves, dressed in their sari. “Ran away from your wedding, huh?”

Their glare darkened, shuttling down behind fifteen walls Isabel knew were there. “What’s it to ya?”

She shrugged, then sat down beside them. She didn’t have much to do anyway, and if they decided to mug her, she’ll take her chances. “Nothing, I guess.”

“What are you doing?”

“You know, you’re asking a lot of questions. You a cop or something?”

They scrunched up their nose, then swirled the swill around the bottle. “Used to be. Used to be someone’s fiancé too.”

Isabel could only hum in reply, then introduced herself when she couldn’t think of anything else to say. “Isabel Lovelace.” 

“Juno Steel. Hey, from lady to lady, can I ask you a question?”

She laughed at that. “You weren’t holding yourself back a few minutes ago, I don’t know what’s stopping you now.”

“I’m being polite,” they snapped. “Anyway, hypothetical question. You seem like the type who knows a lot.” 

Isabel blinked.

They don't wait for Isabel to confirm nor deny that, launching into their rant, “I have a friend who got let off the force just as he got promoted Detective, and he’s not good for much besides shooting things and trying not to let the people around him die. 

“I mean, his mother already killed his baby brother, then herself, and all he had left was his special lady, and he messed all that up too, by running away. What’s a lady like that gotta do to make a living in a place like this, hm? You ever been so lost in a place so familiar?”

She looked at him carefully then, noting the smudged lipstick, all the places the piercings had to go, the henna that was unsuccessfully rubbed off the back of his hands. He was tipsy on this bottle of what smelled like bad, cheap scotch that reminded her of Kepler.

Then she noted that familiar glare.

With a deep breath, she leaned back against the wall next to him.

“Well, I’ve got a friend who thought she had a handle of her life. She was the captain of her own team, and one by one, they started dying. And then she realized someone from her team’s been the one killing them off. So, she killed him and drove her escape boat into a star.

“She came back to the same station, different people. This time, and a few bodies later, she lived. She went back home and all her friends died and now she’s here.”

They’re quiet for a moment, Juno waiting for her to continue, thinking over what she’d shared. Isabel collected her thoughts. 

The sounds of the city filled the silence between them: laundry flapping on laundry lines above them, the sound of hovercars honking and whooshing by, and the hum of radiators and old neon lights. 

If she closed her eyes, she could pretend she was still on that gap year trip to New York.

_Different planet._

_Same—_

“Thrilling story, didn’t really answer my question.”

Isabel opened her eyes then, raising her brows at Juno.

He shrugged, looking away. “Don’t know what I expected, pulling a tourist in on this anyway. You can leave, unless you wanted to just sit with some crazy lady, or something. Captain.”

Isabel laughed. “I just wanted you to hear what it’s like to suddenly be bombarded by someone’s life problems on the fly and be expected to solve them for you, kid. Don’t take it _too_ personally.”

Juno glanced at her warily, then rolled his eyes. He was actually pouting too, and she’d be charmed by that if his desperation didn’t make her feel so _old_.

Isabel hummed, “I think… I’ve got some advice.”

He set the bottle down between them, then stretched his feet out in front of them. The henna there wasn’t smudged off either, and his toenails were a brighter red than his sari. “Lay it on me, then, Cap.”

“Not a captain anymore, Detective.”

“Touché.”

“It’s just variations on a theme for me,” Isabel admitted, voicing words that were hundreds of years old. “Same shit, different decisions. I don’t know what you should do to live out here. Hell, I’m not home because I don’t know what to do with myself. All my friends died before me and I didn’t know how to deal with that.

“But… See it through. Look for the things that are different from the first few times you fucked it all up. Grab those and hang on. Tight. You weren’t a detective before the first time life fucked you over, right?”

“Yeah,” he muttered, tapping a finger on his bright red toenails, cheek leaning on his knees as he looked at her.

“Then, run with that. Keep a vice grip on it. Keep yourself going. You’ve got a lot of life left to live, kid, and it’s not going to go away even if you look it in the eye and sneered at it.”

She pushed herself up, then rooted around her pockets. She handed him a towel, the key to the hotel room she was going to stay in, then a few thousand creds she’d earned from her last foray on Saturn.

Juno stared at it, then at her. There was wonder in his eyes, and that was a look familiar to Isabel too. “What?” This was said flatly, almost comical with the way Juno’s eyes were bulging out of his head.

“Be a detective, kid. And take this. Clean yourself up at the hotel room, sober up, go to whatever registry this planet has for Private Investigators, buy yourself an office space.”

“I-I can’t—” 

“You _can_ ,” Isabel pushed. She pulled her patented Renée look of _I know you can do this, don’t disappoint me_ and almost thrilled at tears that were suddenly filling Juno’s blue, blue eyes, Earth’s skies looking up at her. “I’m going to go back home. And just to let bygones be bygones, I _did_ get something out of this, by the way. And there’s plenty where all this came from, so think of it as a belated engagement gift.”

Juno’s hands were shaking when he took everything she had except her comms and her cards. “I… Cap— uh, Lovelace…?”

She turned and walked away, throwing, “You’re on your own with your ex-fiancée, by the way,” over her shoulder as she made her way back to Hyperion’s spaceport.

Because she could, she looked back. 

Juno was standing there, taking stock for himself for the first time since whenever he got there. She looked back at the adventures she’d gotten herself through, the near-death experiences, the gasps between people, every inhale and exhale.

She blinked. Once. Twice, because she could.

Felt for a mental connection that was centuries old, an alien race that gave birth to her immortal body. It ran, still, it must have, if she was still alive after all these years. She had gone and showed them all the things she’d learned from humanity’s many leaps forward. They could still see through her, hear through her.

She called Hera, got on the first shuttle to Earth, and she

didn’t 

die.

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this out in a fugue state for a few hours straight and came out going "what the fuck even is this" but hey if you've reached this far, i guess.
> 
> i talked extensively about juno's wedding dress, and [this](https://thepenumbrapodcast.fandom.com/wiki/Juno_Steel_-_Gallery?file=Dress.png) was my main reference, in case anyone was wondering. i'm new to the TPP fandom so, hahaha if this isn't anything new to any of you, just let me have it.
> 
> i also took most of my inspiration from isabel's variations on a theme mini-episode and change of mind. my main vibe was honey and the sting's paradise valley, which we all know and love.
> 
> if you're interested in things like this chucklefuck, i'm on [tumblr](http://stubbornjerk.tumblr.com) and [twitter,](http://twitter.com/stubborn_jerk) i guess, if you wanted to follow me.


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